Currently, it is uncertain whether decentralized social media will become a future trend.
The introduction of this article is about Damus. I looked into it when it was popular recently, but I definitely won't use it now. As a product, it is still in its early stages.
In comparison, I have more confidence in Mastodon.
Mastodon and nostr's technical solutions are implemented by a group of non-profit technical geeks (most developers are not from the cryptocurrency industry). They are aimed at users who believe in decentralization or have a need for censorship resistance.
The corresponding Lens solution originates from the cryptocurrency industry (Polygon + IPFS), and currently, the majority of users come from Web3.
The Mastodon community is spread across various communities and is more mainstream, not limited to Web3 users, so the topics within the social protocol are more diverse.
Federated#
Federated (Fediverse) is a pioneer of decentralization in Web3 and can also be seen as a form of decentralization. In the past decade of development, federated services have accumulated a fairly professional open-source ecosystem.
In a federated system, any third party can run a server, and ordinary users can either self-host their servers or choose a trusted third-party server to store their data, and then communicate with the outside world through the broadcasting function of the third party.
Email is the simplest example. Using an internal company email domain is equivalent to self-hosting a federated server, and the data is managed by the company itself.
Using a 163 domain email, our email history is controlled by 163, and the qq email server does not have access to detailed data from 163. However, as a federation, qq and 163 emails can communicate with each other.
In a sense, federated projects are more pure than current Web3 projects. They do not have economic incentive systems. Just the technical implementation of federated decentralization has attracted a large number of enthusiastic users and public server providers.
The most common example is P2P downloads.
Even without incentives, many people still occupy their own network bandwidth and hard drive space (when downloading files via P2P, someone else's computer must have the file you want to download and be willing to contribute network bandwidth to upload the same file to you).
Misskey#
Compared to Mastodon, I also had a good experience with Misskey. It has a more beautiful UI and can interact with Mastodon instances.
Misskey is an open-source decentralized social platform that supports the ActivityPub protocol. Similar to the popular Mastodon, each deployed Misskey service is called an "instance", and accounts between different instances are not interoperable, but they can interact (follow, reply, and boost) across instances;
Different instances are built and maintained by different organizations or individuals, and they interact with each other through the ActivityPub protocol to form a decentralized social network.
Recommendations#
Since Jack Dorsey acquired Twitter, a large number of users have flocked to Mastodon, which led to the official Mastodon instances temporarily not accepting new user registrations. For Chinese users, the popular instances are:
- o3o.ca
- cmx.im
Other good ones include:
Pawoo- nya.one
- mastodon.social